Monday, September 11, 2017

Tinnitus

I’ve had tinnitus since age eighteen. I
began to experience it after a terrible LSD trip in December, 1966. After
getting myself into a hospital and dosed with chlorpromazine, I awoke the next
morning to a ringing and hissing sound in my ears, which has been there ever
since. It is sometimes louder, sometimes quieter. I’ve been living with it so
long I don’t notice it most of the time. Lately, I’ve become a little
fascinated by it.

There are two types of tinnitus: objective
and subjective. Objective tinnitus is an actual noise generated by structures
near the ear and will be perceptible to a doctor with a stethoscope. Subjective
tinnitus is perception of a sound in the absence of an acoustic stimulus. No
doctor will be able to hear it. It doesn’t exist. Except, of course, for you,
the one with the tinnitus. It exists quite emphatically for the person
experiencing it. But the absence of a clear physical cause makes it a curious
phenomenon indeed. Is it mental? A hallucination? An auditory illusion?

Current theory espouses a problem with
auditory neurology. The nerve cells in the auditory region are overactive and
compensating for partial hearing loss. But what if there’s no hearing loss? My
hearing has gotten a little worse with age, and my tinnitus has worsened, so
there might be something to the relationship between tinnitus and hearing loss,
but it’s a weak one. I might ask my wife to repeat herself occasionally (she
has a remarkably soft voice), but on balance my hearing is still pretty good. I
feel on a gut level that it has more to do with something gone a little haywire
in the auditory brainstem.

The
reaction I received when I complained about it for the first time continues to
be the same one today when I mention it to anyone fifty years later: a shrug. Nobody
thinks it’s a big deal. Doctors especially. They tell you to go to home and
learn to live with it. Doctors are like that. Show up with a freshly severed
arm and an alien bursting out of your stomach and they’ll stand there and
stifle a yawn. It must be all that science, I don’t know. That’s worth a study
in itself: what makes doctors – male and female
- so uniformly similar to Charles Grodin?

There
are, however, people who do think tinnitus a big deal and will fully empathize
with you. These would be people who suffer tinnitus. Trust me; it’s a big deal
to them. Think about it: you never have silence.

Let me
say that again: you never have silence.

There
is no cure.

Which
isn’t entirely true. Not long ago I read an article about TMS (Transcranial
Magnetic Stimulation). According to recent studies, low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic
stimulation is able to reduce cortical hyperexcitability.

Say what?!

I called the
neurology department of our healthcare provider and asked if they offered TMS.
Yes, they did. It would require a treatment of approximately eight days. How
much? $9,000, roughly. The treatment is still in the experimental stage so
there’s no way our insurance would cover it. It would be out of pocket. Can’t
do it. Can’t afford it. Ain’t our healthcare system wonderful?

Here’s another
curiosity: people with tinnitus who have taken ecstasy say that it made their
tinnitus go away.

The University of
Aukland in New Zealand has done an actual study investigating this.

Ecstasy, whose
official chemical designation is 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine, was
administered to participants in two separate trials in doses of 30 mg or 70 mg.
These are very small doses, not enough to produce a high, whatever one’s
concept of a high happens to be. No euphoria, for starters. Nobody felt that.
Thank God.

Many of the
participants reported an easing of tinnitus after three hours.

So: not very
conclusive.

But still, quite
interesting. What effect on the auditory neurons was this drug having? Did it
feed the neurons something they liked, light them up with a happy cosmology of glow
sticks and dreampop so they stopped bothering the brain with the whistling and
hissing to get attention?

This theory of
neurons going a little haywire appeals to me in a greater philosophical sense
as a possible explanation for this stubborn phenomenon called tinnitus. If life
is a reality which is making itself in a reality which is unmaking itself, or
inversely, if life is a reality which is unmaking itself in a reality which is
making itself, then this surplus of neuronal activity is reaching for
something. It wants something. It needs something. It is a superfluity in quest
of a fulfilling sensation. It is a testament of flux. Of becoming. It is making
up for a lack. It is compensation for something I can’t quite hear. Perhaps a
choir of angels or planetary music that will finally lull that hiss and whistle
into oblivion.

I’m hearing something
that isn’t there. Not a voice, or voices (that would really freak me out) but a
hiss, a whistle. Neither the hiss or whistle have meaning. They indicate
nothing. They indicate that something in my nervous system has experienced
trauma, but for whatever reason, they continue to make that signal, although
the trauma has long since ceased to exist.

Or has it? Isn’t life
itself an ongoing trauma? That would be putting a slightly histrionic spin on
the problem. But hey, isn’t it a little bit true? Because at the base of life,
of the human condition, is mortality, and mortality is a son of a bitch. It’s a
hell of a thing to reckon with. The Buddhists are right: attachment is pain.
Try not to get attached to things, especially people. Because nothing endures.
Nothing lasts. It’s all impermanent. Ephemeral. Do you see this butterfly
flitting by? That’s us. That’s life. Here today, gone by sunset.

Some people are born
into a life of ease, but who are they? I’ve never met any. Most of the people
I’ve known have had to deal with a lot of pain, a lot of loss, a lot of
conflict. As Heidegger puts it, existence is “care” (Sorge):
to exist is not simply to be, but to be anissuefor oneself, a concern, a problem, an
argument. The first person I have to contend with in the morning is myself. It
might be a memory, a dream, a regret, but there’s a guarantee that something
will haunt me throughout the day, will cling to my consciousness with the same
tenacity as this tinnitus.

Does anybody really
like being alive? Because I’ve known very few people over time who didn’t
require a little alcohol now and then, a little meditation, an antidepressant,
a benzodiazepine, a strip of licorice, a cherry cordial, a little porn, a little
tenderness, a little kick in the pants.

A buzz.

Who doesn’t like a
buzz? Not the sound buzz, but the euphoric buzz, the metaphysical buzz, the
inner buzz, the buoyant buzz.

It may not be the
same kind of buzz several glasses of wine on the Boulevard Saint-Germane in
Paris are apt to produce, but there is this lovely thing called transcendence,
which provides a great balm to the wound of existence. It is chiefly a
philosophical disposition, so drugs and alcohol aren’t really necessary, though
they may have a synergistic effect. Transcendence has a great appeal to me as
it not only helps with my tinnitus but the acceptance of things in general,
phenomena for which I have no control, phenomena which may be irritable or
deeply painful, and which are intimately linked with the process of being
alive. It all comes down to weight: the burdens of daily existence, the
encumbrances and worries that forever intrude on our buoyancy. Transcendence is
helium. Transcendence is the flame shooting warm air into the sphere of one’s
balloon.

Weight is a natural
byproduct of mass. We all have mass: muscle, bone, blood, skin. We also have
family, jobs, plans, ambitions, projects, responsibilities, and bills.

There is the weight
of having to be, pure and simple. This was at the heart of Hamlet’s famous
soliloquy on the subject of suicide: to be or not to be. It’s an option. And
because we have this option, albeit a rather grim one, our burden is lightened
a little.

Suicide is a little
extreme. There’s also just letting things drop. Ka-thump! Or, as they say in
Zen, “let go, don’t be dragged.”

Transcendence is a
function of choice. I can decide not only to be or not to be, but how to be. I
can be a certain way, dress a certain way, talk a certain way, eat a certain way.
In other words, every moment is a possibility. We create ourselves. I can’t
take credit for hands and fingers, for my eyes and ears, nature did that. But I
can assume some agency in how I choose to use them.

In the same way, I
can choose my response to tinnitus. Immersion in the world, for example, will
help disperse my concerns into a larger context. Anything that bugs me will
loosen its grip. I am absorbed in the world and so lose my sense of isolation.
I join in the flux. What we are is Being, and so is how we are. “Smell
the sea and feel the sky / Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic.”

About Me

John Olson is the author of Backscatter: New And Selected Poems, from Black Widow Press, Souls Of Wind, a novel about the notorious French poet Arthur Rimbaud in the American West, from Quale Press, and The Nothing That Is, an autobiographical novel from Ravenna Press. Larynx Galaxy, a collection of essays and prose poetry, appeared in June, 2012, from Black Widow Press. The Seeing Machine , a novel about French painter Georges Braque, appeared from Quale Press in fall 2012.